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Israel's Very Dangerous Gamble

STEPHEN GREEN reports on the real motivations behind Israel's MISSILE STRIKE on SYRIA. PETER MONTAGUE on the NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE or How the Nuke Industry is using Gore's Prize and Global Warming to Plot Its Big Comeback. WILLIAM BLUM on the DEVALUING of "ANTI-SEMITE" or How to Make a Term Meaningless. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now

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"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Today's Stories

October 30, 2007

David Price
Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual

 

October 29, 2007

Lisa Hajjar
Inside Israel's Military Courts

Joe DeRaymond
The Politics of Lethal Injections

Patrick Cockburn
The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan

Isabella Kenfield /
Roger Burbach

Corporate Murder in Brazil

Fred Gardner
The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner

Farzana Versey
Caricaturing Islam

Stephen Fleischman
The Greening of the Oligarchy

Marcelle Cendrars
The Congressional Rip Cord

Eamonn McCann
Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables

Martha Rosenberg
For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter!

Website of the Day
Campaign 2008

 

October 27 / 28, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Dam That Isn't There

James Bovard
Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture

Ralph Nader
Beyond the Rule of Law

M. Reza Pirbhai
The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming!

Robert Sandels
Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations

Jacob G. Hornberger
Ruling By Decree

Missy Beattie
The Arsonists in the West Wing

John Ross
U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca

Robert Fantina
Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader

Ron Jacobs
Labor at the Crossroads

Ali Moayedian
In Search of Logic About Iran

David Michael Green
What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism?

Poets Basement
Block, Davies and Ford

Website of the Day
Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video

 

October 26, 2007

Brian Cloughley
Revenging Bloodshed

Saul Landau
Portrait of Rudy

Ahmad Al-Akras
Getting Justice in the HLF Case

Franklin Lamb
Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry?

Mike Whitney
Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest

Dave Lindorff
Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians

Alan Farago
A Castro Behind Every Bush

Yifat Susskind
Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror

Website of the Day
Dead Life in a Political Prison


October 25, 2007

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Iraq's Environmental Crisis

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homes of the Crash Test Dummies

Paul Craig Roberts
The Fraudulent War on Terror

Col. Dan Smith
The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment

Alan Farago
The Way to Paradise?

Chris Kutalik
The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels

Brian McKinlay
John Howard and the Curse of Bush

Cindy Sheehan
Pete, Nancy, George and WW III

Website of the Day
Support the America's Program!

 

October 24, 2007

Natalie Washington-Weik
White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicides

Michael Birmingham
What Happened in Nahr Al Bared?

Corporate Crime Reporter
The Nuclear Democrats

Tariq Ali
Bush's Cuba Detour

Farzana Versey
Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf

Dave Zirin
White Noise

James Murren
What "Support Our Troops" Means

Todd Chretien
Looking Reality in the Face

Martha Rosenberg
What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage?

Website of the Day
Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power

 

October 23, 2007

Ralph Nader
Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric

Lawrence R. Velvel
Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept.

Vijay Prashad
The Nuke Deal is Dead

Bonnie Bricker /
Adil E. Shamoo

The True Cost of War for Oil

Dave Lindorff
Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment

Mike Whitney
The Big Squeeze

Farzana Versey
Race with the Devil

Stanley Heller /
Ben George

Something New from the Antiwar Movement

Marcelle Cendrars
You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive

Regan Boychuk
Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response

Website of the Day
King Corn

 

October 22, 2007

Ishmael Reed
Should Blacks Go Green?

Marjorie Cohn
Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie

Rannie Amiri
Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness?

Diane Farsetta
Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams

Todd Alan Price
Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education

Robert Jensen
The Quagmire of Masculinity

Stephen Lendman
The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers

Jemima Khan
The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf

Sunsara Taylor
David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth

Binoy Kampmark
No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections

Website of the Day
Support the Center for International Policy

 

 

October 20 / 21, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld

Tariq Ali
A Massacre Foretold

Jeffrey St. Clair
Greetings from Echo Park

Andy Worthington
The Shame of Diego Garcia

Mike Whitney
Housing Flameout

Daniel Wolff
Play It As It Lays

David Rosen
Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution

Saul Landau
David and Goliath in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
COINTELPRO and the Panthers

Robert Fantina
The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones

David Heleniak
Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm

Joe Allen
Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS

Prairie Miller
Lions for Lambs

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Crash!

 

October 19, 2007

John Ross
Che's Mexican Legacy

Sheldon Rampton
Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda

Rahul Mahajan
A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha

Devra Davis
Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer

Christopher Brauchli
Blasphemous Science

Wadner Pierre
Haiti After the Deluge

Bill Quigley
Jailed for Justice

Website of the Day
Textbook Sticker Shock

 

October 18, 2007

Saree Makdisi
Academic Freedom is at Risk

Meg Dwyer
What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead?

Alevtina Rea
Sketches of Russian Life

Norman Solomon
The United States of Violence

Kristoffer Larsson
Something is Rotten in Sweden

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes are Back and So are We

Website of the Day
Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"

 

October 17, 2007

Steve Niva
Counter-Insurgency, American-Style

Andy Worthington
The Case of Mohamed Jawad

Alan Farago
The Credit Shock

Russell Mokhiber
The New Billionaire-Criminal Class

Sharon Smith
Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered

Mike Whitney
Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman

Robert Fantina
Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual

Chris Irwin
Where Have All the Rednecks Gone?

Website of the Day
Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University

October 16, 2007

Peter Linebaugh
Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize

Paul Findley
Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby

Robert Bryce
Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts

Uri Avnery
The Mother of All Pretexts

Paul Craig Roberts
The Iraqi Genocide

Ray McGovern
What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It?

Norman Solomon
The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal

Martha Rosenberg
The Curse of Cymbalta

William S. Lind
Out of the Frying Pan

Joel S. Hirschborn
Time to Boycott Voting

Website of the Day
Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play

 

 

 

 

Subscribe Online

October 31, 2007

Could Rudy Pass the Test?

Giuliani and Torture

By SHERWOOD ROSS

If Rudy Giuliani doubts that sleep deprivation and waterboarding are torture, why doesn't he try them himself?

As the tough-talking Republican advocate of "aggressive questioning," he thinks the "liberal media" exaggerate torture, so why not show them up?

New York City's Finest could do to Rudy what U.S. interrogators are doing to suspects in the Middle East and stage it all on Fox TV because Fox knows all about it. Writers of its "24" series have come up with so many ugly torture ideas the Army asked them to stop because Iraq interrogators have been adopting them.

The torture flap erupted when Sen. John McCain said Giuliani showed his inexperience by doubting waterboarding is torture. Giuliani also said sleep deprivation isn't torture: "I mean, on that theory, I'm getting tortured running for president of the United States. That's plain silly."

Fox could erect a room-sized prison with transparent windows in Times Square where Giuliani will be subjected to a week of no-sleep interrogation. Unlike Iraqi prisoners, the ex-mayor will be allowed to keep his pants on and none of the interrogators will wrap a woman's brassiere around his head, even if both his former wives offer.

To make sure Fox doesn't go soft on Giuliani, sleep-inducing excerpts from his campaign speeches will be piped in around-the-clock, good as any barbiturates. Next, a succession of New York City detectives working four-hour shifts will take turns subjecting Giuliani to "aggressive questioning".

Unlike Abner Louima, the man tortured in Brooklyn's 70th Precinct Station House in 1997, the detectives will not rape Giuliani with a broom handle. But they will scream at him, call him names and shake him violently when he tries to fall asleep, maybe slapping his face now and then. They might even scream at him as they did to Louima, "This is Giuliani time!"

Fox will broadcast the Giuliani's reality show globally, pre-empting all else for the week. Bill O'Reilly himself, a man who knows a thing or two about obscene talk (he settled a suit with a Fox lady producer who alleged he asked her to talk dirty to him on the phone) will decide how profane the detectives can talk.

(FYI, Stalin didn't ridicule sleep deprivation. His goons called it "the conveyor belt" because when one interrogator quit another took over. Soon enough, the sleep deprived wretch would admit to any crime. One father was told his 14-year-old son confessed to writing the Russian novel "Eugene Onegin." If it worked in Moscow under Stalin, why shouldn't it work in New York under Bush?)

After being kept awake for a week, Giuliani will be tied onto a board and dunked repeatedly face down in a tub of water. After a few minutes, interrogators will ask: "Dick Cheney says waterboarding is not torture. Right or wrong?"

As Giuliani gets dunked, O'Reilly could explain to Fox viewers this non-torture is a grand old American custom, dating back to witch-dunking of Colonial times.

Of course, Giuliani's Republican opponents are going to envy his exposure and demand to be non-tortured as well. Being first on Fox, though, will give Giuliani the chance to gain the experience McCain says he lacks. Afterwards, he can tell voters if elected precisely how far he will let the Pentagon's non-torturers go. Indeed, a Giuliani presidency could usher in scores of network survival shows, starring actual Moslem and Arab suspects non-tortured before the eyes of the world. And Fox could call the series: "It's Giuliani time!"

Sherwood Ross is an American columnist. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

 


 

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